Nine Network presenter and co-host of The Voice, Sonia Kruger, thinks Australia should not allow Muslims to immigrate to Australia, saying she agrees with the views of controversial columnist Andrew Bolt and US presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Speaking on the Today show this morning, Kruger said “Andrew Bolt has a point, there is a correlation between the number of people who are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks”.

Kruger claimed there were no terrorist attacks in Japan, which she said “has a population of 174 million” (the country’s population is nearly 50 million less at around 126 million) because there were only 100,000 Muslims.

She called for an end to Muslim immigration, saying “personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia, because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day”.

Kruger, who first came to public attention as dancer Tina Sparkle in the 1992 film Strictly Ballroom, went on to present the Channel 7 show Dancing with the Stars before swapping to Nine five years ago.

She hosts the mid-morning edition of Today with David Campbell, who disagreed with her views after Kruger said she’d like to see “freedom of speech”.

“I’d like to see freedom of religion too, as well as freedom of speech,” Campbell said.

But Kruger, who said she has “a lot of very good friends who are Muslims”, replied “so you’re not allowed to talk about it? You’re not allowed to discuss it?

“I would venture that if you spoke to the parents of those children killed in Nice then they would be of the same opinion,” she said, as Today host Lisa Wilkinson pointed out the first woman killed in the attack was Muslim.

So did she favour Donald Trump’s approach, Wilkinson asked, and shut the border to Muslims?

“Yes I would. I think we have something like 500,000 now in our country -well perhaps it is – but I think for the safety of the citizens here, I think it is important.”

This afternoon Kruger defended her stance, once again invoking Nice and the deaths of 10 children to say “as a mother, I believe it’s vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled a racist”.

In 2008 Kruger attempted to joke on Dancing with the Stars about her clothes for the Melbourne Cup carnival, saying “let’s just say there is a sweat shop full of illegal immigrants working on them right now”.

She then turned to the show’s Malaysian-born musical director Chong Lim and said, “How is the family Chong? Alright?”